Galileo Games Dreamation Schedule

FRIDAY

9AM: R166 – The Art of Power; Intrigue at the Queen’s Court

2PM: R174 – Bulldogs!: Getting There

3PM L010 – Shelter In Place

SATURDAY

9AM: R235 – Mortal Coil: Grab Bag of Holding

9AM: R229 – Bulldogs!; Getting There

2PM: R265 – The Art of Power; Intrigue at the Queen’s Court

8PM: R279 – Bulldogs!: No More Gas

Midnight: L032 – Shelter in Place

Buy The Games Mentioned in This Post

Bulldogs

Mortal Coil

Shelter in Place

The cover for the Mortal Coil Compilation “More Things In Heaven And Earth” has been revealed!  The art for this compilation was done by George C. Cotronis. This compilation will be coming out in March, and will be a collection of all the Mortal Coil campaign frame supplements. These supplements range from stories about old gods living in the modern world to souls trying to escape from heaven.

You can read about Mortal Coil and find out how to download all the supplements separately at the Mortal Coil page. For more information about new and upcoming releases, visit our New Releases page.

Brian Engard is a freelance writer and game designer. He’s written for Galileo Games, Rite Publishing, Evil Hat Productions, and others, and he spends a lot of time ranting about player agency on Twitter. He also hosts a monthly meetup of game designers called the Meetup of Doom at his house near Philadelphia. He lives there with his wife Nicole and his two dogs, Coda and Beau.

Interview with Brian Engard

-J.R.

An Excerpt From Fred:

“We’ve had that old dog, what, fifteen years now, do you figure?” He went on, pausing for the sake of answers, knowing he wouldn’t hear any, but he was just used to the rhythm of conversation with his wife. “We never did bring her to a shelter, did we? Even when things got bad. Even when they told us you had the cancer and they gave you the Chemo?”

Still, Lilly didn’t answer. She crouched back, away from the dog, but that was only because she’d finished eating it.

Interview

-J.R.

An Excerpt from Third Date Questions:

I was supposed to get laid tonight.

Instead, I’m sitting at a table in a very hip restaurant – La Merde – alone. And the likely very-large bill is coming my way.

Pete just left. After dessert arrived, he asked me a question. I answered honestly, and then he stormed out in quite a huff. He’s left me with the check and without a date for the rest of the night. I never said I was the dainty type. I never said I was the fragile flower who hopped into a little hole and cried when the zombies rose. When things need doing, I do them.

Interview

Your story has a strong sense of voice, where we really feel sympathy for our characters bad date. Is this the voice of personal experience, or is it built on stories you’ve heard about dates gone bad?

Well, who hasn’t had bad dates? But it’s really about how the third date is when you get to know someone, find out they’re orthodox whatever, or hardcore That Other Political Party, or hate the country your grandparents came from. It’s an exciting time, but can also be rather… unveiling.

Humans adapt. It’s what we do. When the OMG WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE fear stabilizes after something bad happens, then we go back to, “We’re out of bread,” and “Gas is expensive,” and “I need to find someone to marry and continue my bloodline even though the world has gone to hell” problems. Those everyday problems don’t go away when the apocalypse comes, we just have to reconcile the little everyday problems with the big, world-changing ones.

Two of my audio dramas for Leviathan Chronicles, The Ward and The Rogue Plague, just went live, and I’m working on a third script right now. You can find me and my work at murverse.com.

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.

-J.R. Blackwell

Excerpt from Samuel Colt Made Them Equal:

The first bullet fired ripped out a chunk of Brenda Morrisís neck. She was a mother of three. Her daughter Louise complained of a stomachache on The Last Day. Brenda got stuck in traffic trying to flee the city. She heard screaming from the backseat. She turned to shush her kids. Louise bit off two of her fingers.

Interview

In this story we follow the path of a gun around the zombie apocalypse. What inspired you to use an inanimate object as your main character?

The flash fiction format keeps a writer lean on character and exposition. I’ve seen stories from the survivors and stories from the zombies. I needed something to hook the reader without being able to devote time to setting up the zombies or the characters. Guns are an important part of almost every zombie story. Guns are a means of survival, a symbol of power or even a way out of the horror. At the same time, they get lost, dropped, run out of ammo and more. Looking at a single gun and talking about the hands that touched it seemed like a good way to explore this corner of the end of the world.

During the story, we see the point of view of many characters as they explore the world of this zombie apocalypse. Did you have a whole world in mind when you wrote this story, or did it evolve organically as you followed the path of the gun?

The story grew organically as I wrote it. I knew I wanted to tell the story of the gun, who it shot and what those people were before the zombies came. I knew that some of the stories would be sad, some heroic and some funny. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time to set up the zombie rules, so telling them by implication was a necessity anyway. “Showing, not telling” is one of those fun rules to play with.

What are the projects that you are currently working on, and where can people find you online?

I’ve been booked a lot for projects with Catalyst Game Labs so far this year. I’m a huge Shadowrun fan and being able to add to that world is a huge kick. I also contribute to Collider and Onion AV Club on a regular basis. And, as always, I have a few things still not quite ready to come out of the oven yet.

My blog links to all my work at mazecontroller.blogspot.com

Folks looking to follow me can do so @robowieland on Twitter.

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.

Stormy Weather is a free Bulldogs! Adventure scenario about rebels, sabotage, firefights, corporations and what it’s like to be stuck in the middle.  All Bulldogs! Adventure scenarios contain tips on running adventures for Bulldogs! and other FATE games, as well as full fleshed out NPCs for each level of character power, allowing GMs to use the adventure scenario for their group regardless of current power level. Today’s interview with David about Stormy Weather covers the setting, writing for Bulldogs! and what other projects he’s currently working on.

Interview with David Moore

When did you learn about Bulldogs?

I learned about Bulldogs! slightly before, or at, Gen Con 2011. I’m not quite sure when exactly it was. At the time I was planning something I called my Year of FATE. Playing and running FATE games of different sorts to get myself even more familiar with the nuances of the system. One of my friends in the podcasting community told me about Bulldogs!, and the pitch made me want to pick it up to learn more.

The pitch was “Firefly set in the Star Trek universe.” Being the Browncoat that I am, I just had to pick it up and read it. I mean, how could I not? Small time folks, trying to scratch a living in a galaxy of high tech wonders and politics. I was hooked.

What was the biggest challenge in creating a FATE system adventure?

Having too many ideas to write down. It’s supposed to be a short adventure, and I wanted it to be memorable and fit the style of game I like to run. Those things don’t always fit together. I like giving players a lot of choice, having the NPCs react and act to those choices. Writing an adventure that was both shorter, while giving the players choices in how the adventure plays out was difficult.

One of Stormy Weather’s main themes is rebellion. What inspired you to use that theme in a Bulldogs! setting?

To me, it fit. As I mentioned before, the pitch was Firefly set in Star Trek, and a big theme of Firefly was rebellion. The crew that plays the module is probably scraping by, and might decide to throw in with the underdog rebellion. They might also side with the government, deciding that the government is in the right, or just hoping for a bigger payday. I thought that choice was an interesting one I could give players, and could lead to an even more expansive campaign at home if the GM wanted to expand on it. I’d like to hear if people do.

I also wanted it to mean a little more than a delivery run gone wrong. I felt that the crew would have their fair share of those already, and I wanted to give players a chance to talk with the people they were delivering cargo to. I hope I gave the GM and players enough loose ends and hooks to get them interested in coming back to the planet.

Stormy Weather is a flexible adventure, one that lets characters make a variety of choices. Was it difficult to write out an adventure that let players go in so many different directions?

Writing it, yes. The style of game I run gives my players a lot of choice, and I wanted that for the people who will run and play Stormy Weather. Fitting that into a short adventure, and giving the GM enough information to run it without saying “wing it here,” was hard.

I did have help though. Sam Chupp wrote an adventure for us at The Game Master Show several years back called Pocket Full of Secrets, which had branching paths that let the players move in the adventure more organically. I used that as a template for Stormy Weather’s branching choices that the players have. I also encourage the GMs to let the players wander. My goal is to give the GM enough information about the situation, the NPC personalities, and the setting, so the characters can make the choices they want to and the GM can handle them. There is no need to strictly stick to the module if the players make choices that aren’t in it, in fact, I encourage it.

That’s a lot to put into a short module, so yes, writing it was difficult but extremely satisfying.

What projects are you currently working on?

The big gaming project I am working on right now is Vegas After Midnight, the brainchild of Mick Bradley. I am glad that he is letting me play in his brain. The setting is Las Vegas, sometime after a great calamity that leaves only Vegas and a small area around it as the only thing left. Vegas, itself already crazy in today’s age, has a life of it’s own and affects the people living in it. So at the   Coliseum, the Romans hold sway, complete with their own Ceasar and daily chariot races. At Circus Circus, the Carnies rule and entertain with their own bizarre sense of humor. I’m not going to give a date for when it’s coming, since life has had a way of delaying this project enough already.

The other major project I am working on is a novel I co-wrote with Katherine Guevara. It’s a post apocalyptic fantasy that I hesitate to call steampunk for fear that steampunk zealots will stone me for it not being set in the Victorian age. It’s really a story about the main characters coming of age, discovering their true power, and the way they can affect the changes going on in the world they are in. I’m editing it now, and I’ll tell you, editing for me is the worst. It’s moving along at a steady pace, and this one I hope to get out in some form, by the end of the year.

I had a great time writing for the Bulldogs! universe, and I would love to write in it again. I’d like to thank Brennan for the opportunity to write in such a rich and yet open setting.

About David Moore

David Moore is the award-winning host of The Signal’s gaming segment, creator of the After Serenity podcast, and was the co-producer of The Game Master Show. He currently produces podcasts and articles for The Secret Lair, as well as managing their dirigible fleet as Commandant Vandermore. He is hard at work producing more role playing game content and works of fiction, and passing his lifetime love of gaming to his kids.

-J.R. Blackwell

An Excerpt from Second Base:

Jimmy’s hand is warm. The zombie on the ground is, too. It’s giving off steam in this early autumn morning, vapors rising from blistered, puckered flesh the color of oxblood leather. Come noon, the flies will find it again. And the maggots.

(The dead run hot. So do, as it turns out, teenagers.)

It moans and thrashes around on the ground. Like a baby throwing a tantrum. The dead man—least, he figures it’s a man—must’ve crawled up into one of the flower beds out behind the barn and now here he is, next to an old shovel, a bag of mulch, a rusted garden trowel.

“We shouldn’t be out here,” Becky says, giving Jimmy’s hand a little tug. Her fellow 15-year-old lifts his cap—an old Phillies cap from years back when they won the Series—and gives her that self-assured smile he’s so good at giving.

“It’s all good,” he answers, waving it off. “Dad says most of the dead are like this now.” She thinks back to a time before when they found a deer hit by a car. Most of its back half was messed up real bad, it’s guts hanging out like it was trying to birth an octopus. And still the deer lived, its front hooves scrambling to gain purchase on the asphalt.

Eventually a cop came and shot it. In the head. Just like you’d do to a zombie.

Maybe Jimmy’s father is right.

Maybe things are slowly moving back to center. Back to normal.

Interview

-J.R. Blackwell

First, an excerpt from Jared Axelrod’s Story: Don’t Work So Well

I know my brain don’t work so well anymore. It’s hard to think, to focus. I keep getting distracted.  There’s all these smells around, so many smells. It’s easy to stand there, out in the street, catching all the smells as they slink past on the breeze. To just sway with the wind, taking everything in through my nose. But I’ve got to focus. I have to find Carla.

The wind smells so good, though. So good. It smells like…I can’t find the word. Words have become very difficult. They are always on the tip of my tongue.

I am trying to find Carla, Carla with her black hair. We need to find our house. Our house has white trim. I remember that. There are zombies everywhere, and I’m worried she’s been attacked, been bitten. I stay where the zombies aren’t. I have to find her. I have to find her and our house. And then, we’ll…do something. I’m not sure. I’ve never been a planner. Who can plan in a world like this? A world gone mad. Full of monsters. And smells and…

Delicious. That’s the word. What everything smells like. Delicious.

Interview

In your story, Don’t Work So Well, we actually get inside the head of a zombie. What made you decide tell the story from this point of view?

It was something I’ve always been fascinated by, because it’s something we so rarely see. Zombies are death coming for you, literal corpse chasing at your ankles, but they are so often portrayed as inhuman. They’re shown as a swarm of insects, without individuality, or as rabid, hungry dogs. Not people. And that’s frightening, certainly. To see something that resembles a human but whose action is alien or savage, that’s scary. But far more frightening to me is the idea that the people we know and love are still in there, and they are trying to function as best they can as their body slowly deteriorates.

I shattered my ankle a few years ago, and had to relearn how to walk. And it was hard. Here was a skill I had been doing nearly my entire life but because something was damaged, nothing worked right anymore. The signals I usually sent to my leg were getting lost, and I had start all over. Our narrator’s frustration with his own body came out of that. That feeling of being a rational, thinking adult in your head, but being unable to outrun a toddler.

So that horror, that betrayal of your arms and legs, and being unable to do what you’ve spent your entire life doing, that horror was very real to me. And much, much scarier than being chased.

Smell is the primary sense that illustrates your story. Since stories usually use visuals to inform the reader, was taking this route a challenge?

Yes and no. On the one hand, the narrator is slowly losing his vocabulary, so I was able to describe just about everything as “delicious.” So that was time saver! No need for the thesaurus this time!

On the other, it was a different way of thinking about things. While I wanted our zombie narrator to have conscious thought, I also wanted him to have a typical zombie behavior. So all those zombie tropes–the lurching walk, the ignoring of obstacles, the desire to eat brains—all that had to come from an understandable place. Making smell the primary sense, then, made a great deal of the justification easy. Smells distract us when we’re walking down the street. They can waft through closed doors and around corners. When we smell something enticing, we will often stop what we’re doing and walk toward it. Walking into a bakery in the morning can be a delirious, overwhelming experience.

Bad smells, by contrast, will force us to move ourselves out of our way to avoid them. We can look at something ugly without flinching or sit through several minutes of a siren going off. But a bad smell, and our body is not our own. We have to get away from it. Despite how much we might want to stay, our body moves us to where the smells are sweeter, less toxic. Only then can we think clearly, and regain control of the body we thought we were in charge of.
So imagine then, if that was your only sense, your only way of interacting with world. Unable to register process visual cues, who knows what obstacles we might blindly charge toward, in the pursuit of comforting scents? That’s the narrator’s life, and he’s dealing with it as best he can. Which is not very well at all.

What are the projects that you are currently working on, and where can people find you online?

I’ve got a graphic novel, THE BATTLE OF BLOOD AND INK coming out this spring from Tor Books. It’s got art by the amazingly talented Steve Walker (who’s work you can see at http://stevejwalkerstudio.blogspot.com/ ), and can be pre-ordered from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Blood-Ink-Fable-Flying/dp/0765331306 and Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/battle-of-blood-and-ink-jared-axelrod/1103277235 I’m working on a pair of podcast prequel stories to the graphic novel, which you can listen to over at http://fablesoftheflyingcity.com Book 1, ASHE OF THE AIR, is complete and ready to listen to and Book 2, MOUTHS OF THE DEAD, starts up later this month. There’s also some great character art by Steve on the site, as well as some comic pages, to give you an idea what the graphic novel is going be like.

I’ve got a bunch of projects that I can’t quite talk about yet, but when I do, I’ll be talking about them on http://www.jaredaxelrod.com

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.

-J.R. Blackwell

Now an excerpt from Philippa Ballantine’s story, Unexpected Residents:

Footsteps on the stairs, running, screaming, and there she is. Ellen, covered in blood, scratched by twigs, her eyes as wide as the moon outside the window. “Not ghosts, not fucking ghosts!” She is screaming.

Below he can hear the groans. They have broken through the second floor doorways. The zombies are moving, slowly but calmly up. They’re hungry. Steve can smell them.

Interview

What made you think of using a reality show to stage a zombie story?

I’ve always been a big fan of those ‘reality’ ghost shows on television. I find them a curious mixture of the unexplained and ridiculous. People jumping at every creak of a house, and breath of wind, and yet then sometimes something inexplicable. It tickled my sense of humor to imagine that a group of people finding something paranormal and yet something they never really counted on. Oh, and then imagining the chaos that would ensue.

A part of this story is told from the point of view of what a camera sees of the action. Why did you make this choice to tell part of the story through this lens?

The lens is really the only reliable witness in this case. It moves with the people and sees the things in a purely circumspect light. It also gives the literary illusion of the reality show that the characters are living in. I don’t quite have them slobbering into it like the Blair Witch…but it’s not far off.

What are the projects that you are currently working on, and where can people find you online?

I am currently working on Harbinger, the final of the Books of the Order after Geist, Spectyr and Wrayth (coming later this year). Then Tee and I will start thinking about the third Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel. You can find all about me http://www.pjballantine.com/ and the Ministry at http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com/

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.